If you are caught in the mirror universe and need to use Perl from within Excel, I know two ways of doing that. The first way is a very easy way, and I've supplied information to Excel that way. You simply write a HTTP server in Perl that serves a page that mostly consists of a <TABLE>. That table can be easily accessed and refreshed from within Excel. No special setup of Excel is needed. You just need to link the data in the sheet to the external HTTP address.

The second way would be through XLLoop, an Excel Add-In that allows you to write Excel function in other languages, and even serve the requests from a central server. I haven't used this, but it could be a way to avoid Visual Basic as glue.